The development of a compiler for cellular automata simulator
Y. Akamine, Satoshi Endo, Kôji Yamada · 2004
This paper describes the compiler that we have developed in this study for high-speed simulation of cellular automata (CA). CA is a powerful method to understand and simulate the behavior of complex systems. CA is temporal and spatial discrete system. Updating many cells' state valves at high speed is needed for a high precision simulation. SIMD instructions can accelerate CA simulations because each cell can be updated simultaneously in CA theory. The compiler generates a high speed simulator using MMX technology. MMX technology is one of SIMD technologies and enables to process many operations by a single instruction. The compiler generates a simulator from the description of local rules in DORA language. We designed DORA language for cording local rules with simple description naturally. We ran the performance test of the simulator generated by our compiler. The results showed that the simulators generated by our compiler runs about 3 to 11 times faster than ones with C compiler.